Not the biggest fish he's let go but the juxtaposition and timing are just too much not to note.

The Obama administration reportedly has released a prisoner from the Guantanamo Bay detention camp accused of attacking U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

According to Reuters, the administration released Mohammed Jawad to his home in Afghanistan.

Jawad had been accused of throwing a grenade in 2002 that injured two U.S. soldiers and their interpreter in Kabul. He has returned to his family, according to his lawyer.

I'm open to correction on this but throwing a grenade makes you a combatant and according to the laws of armed conflict, captured combatants can be held until the end of hostilities. Given that hostilities are ongoing in Afghanistan, this is a purely optional move mandated by no law.

Traditionally the President of the United States is on the side of...the United States. I guess this is what Obama was talking about when he promised, "Change".

Added: I've tried to avoid the kind of idiotic garbage we've heard for 8 years from the left and my statement above could be thrown in that category. That said, there's no way to argue that Obama's actions haven't made it harder for those who protect American and easier for terrorists. Whether or not Obama is actively trying to help terrorists is irrelevant. Obama's choices and actions have consequences beyond his intentions. I don't see how anyone can look at today's news and say they improve American security or qualify as being on America's side.

Posted by: DrewM at 02:55 PM | Comments (2)
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I can't believe it myself.

Is there no honor among butchers?

The man who took the decision to free the Lockerbie bomber from jail on compassionate grounds accused him yesterday of breaking an undertaking not to celebrate his release.

Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi, the Libyan convicted of the bombing, had shown “no sensitivity” to the families of those who died, Kenny MacAskill, Scotland’s Justice Secretary, told the Scottish Parliament....

He kinda didn't show them any sensitivity when he murdered them, either.

Check out the pic of this guy that runs with the story: more...

Posted by: Ace at 02:30 PM | Add Comment
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I think homicide includes the possibility of suicide, though.

Weird.

Guess we'll be hearing more about this.

Posted by: Ace at 12:26 PM | Add Comment
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At least 10 and maybe 12 cases will be examined.

With an eye to jailing people, of course.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has decided to appoint a prosecutor to examine nearly a dozen cases in which CIA interrogators and contractors may have violated anti-torture laws and other statutes when they allegedly threatened terrorism suspects, according to two sources familiar with the move.

Holder is poised to name John Durham, a career Justice Department prosecutor from Connecticut, to lead the inquiry, according to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the process is not complete.

Durham's mandate, the sources added, will be relatively narrow: to look at whether there is enough evidence to launch a full-scale criminal investigation of current and former CIA personnel who may have broken the law in their dealings with detainees. Many of the harshest CIA interrogation techniques have not been employed against terrorism suspects for four years or more.

Holder chose someone who seems to be on the hunt to "get" the CIA:

The attorney general selected Durham in part because the longtime prosecutor is familiar with the CIA and its past interrogation regime. For nearly two years, Durham has been probing whether laws against obstruction or false statements were violated in connection with the 2005 destruction of CIA videotapes. The tapes allegedly depicted brutal scenes including waterboarding of some of the agency's high value detainees. That inquiry is proceeding before a grand jury in Alexandria, although lawyers following the investigation have cast doubt on whether it will result in any criminal charges.

Obviously some object:

But nine GOP senators who occupy prominent roles on the Judiciary Committee last week urged Holder not to act at all, arguing that further investigation was both unnecessary and unwise.

"The intelligence community will be left to wonder whether actions taken today in the interest of national security will be subject to legal recriminations when the political winds shift," said the letter, signed by lawmakers including Sens. Jon Kyl (Ariz.), Jeff Sessions (Ala.), John Cornyn (Tex.), Orrin Hatch (Utah) and Charles Grassley (Iowa).

The IG report has been released. Among the horrors: Just after 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad was told that his children would be killed if "anything else happened" in the US. There are also claims that top terrorists were threatened with executions (mock executions), guns, and a power-drill.

Threats? We're going to prosecute people for threats?

In case you missed it, Leon Panetta threatened to quit in a "profanity-laced screaming match" regarding the released IG report.

Left Hand Doesn't Know What the Far Left Hand is Doing UPDATE [Gabe]: Gibbsie reacts, distances President Obama from AG Holder:

"The President has said repeatedly that he wants to look forward, not back, and the President agrees with the Attorney General that those who acted in good faith and within the scope of legal guidance should not be prosecuted. Ultimately, determinations about whether someone broke the law are made independently by the Attorney General. "

Uh huh.

Posted by: Ace at 10:43 AM | Comments (3)
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Yeah, but so what? tmi3rd wrote a great piece about being "wrong" on how to oppose the Obama administration, and if you missed it, you should go and read the whole darn thing right now. The only objection that I would have to his premise is calling his former position "wrong". Mistaken would be better, I think - because "wrong" and "right" are such stark, black & white terms.

The majority of conservatives who objected to the in-your face tactics of hardcases like Jeff Goldstein and Rush's Infamous Four Words were basing their objection on the perfectly reasonable assumption that these would make reasonable debate on the issue impossible. I, for one, never want to get to the point where people who want to use logic to trump emotion are shouted down and run out of town on a rail.

I was probably the most vocal AoSHQ co-blogger on the side of the "hardcases" in this skirmish, so I think that it partly falls upon me to help set the tone for those who agreed with me a few short months ago. It's simple, and, in the spirit of the aforementioned Infamous Four Words, I managed to boil it down to THREE WORDS.

Lighten. Up. Francis.

You could also summarize it as "Don't be a douchebag", but "Lighten up, Francis" works better in G-rated company. If you encounter a fellow conservative who has changed their mind on how to engage the Left during the last 6 months, just smile and tell them that you're glad that we see eye to eye now. Don't be "that guy". You know the guy I'm talking about - constantly reminding everyone about how he knew how to handle this whole thing LONG before everyone else came around to HIS way of thinking, and bitching about how nobody gives him any credit for being some sort of Rocket Surgeon of Political Discourse. "That guy" is a douchebag. Please don't be a douchebag.

All of us are in the same boat now, so I see no reason to even bring the issue up. The only reason I mentioned it was to try and set an example so that cooperation can trump Idealogical Purity and we can start shifting our focus over to the people who REALLY disagree with our concept of how America should be governed.

Anyway, that's my opinion.

Posted by: Russ from Winterset at 10:06 AM | Add Comment
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Typical gray people:

First, we need to protect Medicare and not cut it in the name of "health-insurance reform." As the president frequently, and correctly, points out, Medicare will go deep into the red in less than a decade. But he and congressional Democrats are planning to raid, not aid, Medicare by cutting $500 billion from the program to fund his health-care experiment. The president also plans to cut hospital payments and Medicare Advantage, all of which will mean fewer treatment options for seniors. These types of "reforms" don't make sense for the future of an already troubled federal program or for the services it provides that millions of Americans count on.

Second, we need to prohibit government from getting between seniors and their doctors. The government-run health-care experiment that Obama and the Democrats propose will give seniors less power to control their own medical decisions and create government boards that would decide what treatments would or would not be funded. Republicans oppose any new government entity overruling a doctor's decision about how to treat his or her patient.

Simply put, we believe that health-care reform must be centered on patients, not government.

Third, we need to outlaw any effort to ration health care based on age. Obama has promoted a program of "comparative effectiveness research" that he claims will be used only to study competing medical treatments. But this program could actually lead to government boards rationing treatments based on age. For example, if there are going to be only so many heart surgeries in a given year, the Democrats figure government will get more bang for its buck if more young and middle-aged people get them.

[points 4 and 5 omitted; 4 is ending Obama's end-of-life Soylent Green counseling, and 5 is protecting and improving the Tricare system for military families.]

Barack Obama campaigned on "post-partisanship." As president, however, Obama has shown that he is beholden to his party's left-wing ideologues. It's not too late for him to honor his pledges for bipartisan health-care reform. Reversing course and joining Republicans in support of health care for our nation's senior citizens is a good place to start. Doing so will help him restart the reform process to give Americans access to low-cost, high-quality health care.

If ObamaCare fails, it will be due to seniors. (And I think they were also critical in stopping HillaryCare.)

It's very difficult to ever scale back federal commitments to seniors, as they are famously a high-turnout cohort in any election, and tend to be interested (for obvious reasons) in senior issues. It's a one-way ratchet, in which benefits can only increase. And any time you want to try to cinch an election, you push for expanded benefits and new programs for seniors.

So if we can stop this madness, we'll have seniors, mostly, to thank.

But this demonstrates an overlooked problem with ObamaCare. ObamaCare would put 50 million Americans (and, um, non-Americans too) in the same position as seniors with regard to federal benefits -- we'd add 50 million people not only as regards federal entitlement, but to the already-huge bloc of voters for whom entitlements can never be trimmed and can only be increased due to their strong political clout.

Seniors constitute 20% of the electorate; adding another 10%, more or less, to a bloc of voters whose federal benefits can only expand would dramatically reshape this country's politics and economics.

Which is of course probably the whole idea.

Different Than Seniors, Too: Although seniors have been forced on to a socialized system of medicine, they lived their lives under a capitalist model, and can be expected, then, to appreciate the benefits of that latter model.

Barack Obama's plan is to put a huge number of Americans on the socialist system from cradle to grave.

Posted by: Ace at 10:01 AM | Add Comment
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At the moment he thinks it's more likely we'll have a "U" shaped recession (a "recovery" with very slow and soft growth that is almost but not quite recessionary itself).

But he sees risks of the dreaded "W" too.

There are also now two reasons why there is a rising risk of a double-dip W-shaped recession. For a start, there are risks associated with exit strategies from the massive monetary and fiscal easing: policymakers are damned if they do and damned if they donÂ’t. If they take large fiscal deficits seriously and raise taxes, cut spending and mop up excess liquidity soon, they would undermine recovery and tip the economy back into stag-deflation (recession and deflation).

But if they maintain large budget deficits, bond market vigilantes will punish policymakers. Then, inflationary expectations will increase, long-term government bond yields would rise and borrowing rates will go up sharply, leading to stagflation.

Another reason to fear a double-dip recession is that oil, energy and food prices are now rising faster than economic fundamentals warrant, and could be driven higher by excessive liquidity chasing assets and by speculative demand. Last year, oil at $145 a barrel was a tipping point for the global economy, as it created negative terms of trade and a disposable income shock for oil importing economies. The global economy could not withstand another contractionary shock if similar speculation drives oil rapidly towards $100 a barrel.

In summary, the recovery is likely to be anaemic and below trend in advanced economies and there is a big risk of a double-dip recession.

That whole thing about oil... It's bizarre that Obama and the Democratic Party have apparently decided to just hope for the best with regard to oil. To just pray that we don't have yet another big run-up in the cost of oil that tips us back into recession (or deeper into recession if we're not out yet).

That's not a workable economic strategy, and it's an awful political one. Whenever oil prices spike, the public gets frothy about oil exploration. True, when the jam-up eases, they forget all about it. (Alas.)

Obama and the Democrats have ignored entirely the last oil crunch, the one that plunged this country, and the world, into a deep recession. They have not expanded supply in the least.

What the hell do they think is going to happen when this all happens again, which it always does? The public will remember that many Republicans (including of course Sarah Palin) were pushing hard for expanded domestic energy production and were entirely ignored. The public isn't thinking about this much now, but when it happens again, it will be practically all they think about, and Obama's solar power and unicorn farts plan for green energy is not going to mollify them.

Posted by: Ace at 09:23 AM | Add Comment
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Thanks to Radio Vice.

Posted by: LauraW at 07:27 AM | Add Comment
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This is a follow-up to my post last night about the Obama DOJ's suggestion that the President start criminal investigations and prosecutions of CIA officers and contractors who participated in detainee interrogations (and possible detainee abuse). The former general counsel for the CIA writes in today's WaPo that this is a bad idea:

-- Second, the CIA provided the inspector general's report to the Justice Department in 2004. Justice has not prosecuted any CIA officers but did successfully prosecute a contractor who beat a detainee to death, an incident that was initially reported to the department by the CIA. What has changed that makes prosecution advisable now? No administration is above the law. But the decision of one administration to prosecute career officers for acts committed under a policy of a previous administration must be taken with the greatest care. Prosecutions would set the dangerous precedent that criminal law can be used to settle policy differences at the expense of career officers.

-- Third, after Justice declined to prosecute, the CIA took administrative action, including disciplinary action against those officers whose conduct it deemed warranted such responses. This is standard procedure; reports of possible criminal activity must be referred to Justice. If it declines to prosecute, the matter is sent back to the CIA for appropriate administrative action.

-- Fourth, prosecuting CIA officers risks chilling current intelligence operations. This country faces an array of serious threats. A prosecution or extensive investigation will be an unmanageable expense for most CIA officers. More significant, their colleagues will become reluctant to take risks. What confidence will they have when their senior officers say not to worry, "this has been authorized by the president and approved by Justice"? And such reactions would be magnified if prosecutions focus only on the lower-ranking officers, not those in the chain of command. Such prosecutions are likely to create cynicism in the clandestine service, which is deeply corrosive to any professional service.

As the man says, go read the whole thing.

Update: Via several commenters (thanks!), CIA Director Leon Panetta apparently threatened in a "profanity-laced tirade" to quit over AG Holder's insistence that the DOJ start criminal investigations. An ABC News report is here.

Folks are asking if this is genuine or not. Remember that Panetta came down really hard on Pelosi when she attacked the agency. His initial instinct was to defend his people. It was only later that he came along with the "power point presentation = secret assassination squad" thing.

I think his fury over a DOJ witchhunt in his agency is genuine. He knows these people and he's working with them. The last thing he wants is for the intelligence apparatus to fall apart on his watch. And he's got one of the most impossible tasks in the Obama Administration: protect the United States from his own President's and his own party's political folly. His own party constantly undermines his efforts and, still, he's going to be blamed if we are attacked again.

The Story that Keeps on Giving Update: Panetta sent a letter to CIA employees today. It reads in part:

As Director in 2009, my primary interest-when it comes to a program that no longer exists-is to stand up for those officers who did what their country asked and who followed the legal guidance they were given. That is the President's position, too. The CIA was aggressive over the years in seeking new opinions from the Department of Justice as the legal landscape changed. The Agency sought and received multiple written assurances that its methods were lawful. The CIA has a strong record in terms of following legal guidance and informing the Department of Justice of potentially illegal conduct.

I make no judgments on the accuracy of the 2004 IG report or the various views expressed about it. Nor am I eager to enter the debate, already politicized, over the ultimate utility of the Agency's past detention and interrogation effort. But this much is clear: The CIA obtained intelligence from high-value detainees when inside information on al-Qa'ida was in short supply. Whether this was the only way to obtain that information will remain a legitimate area of dispute, with Americans holding a range of views on the methods used. The CIA requested and received legal guidance and referred allegations of abuse to the Department of Justice. President Obama has established new policies for interrogation.

The CIA must also keep its focus on the primary responsibility of protecting the country. America is a nation at war. This Agency plays a decisive role in helping the United States meet the full range of security threats and opportunities overseas. That starts with the continuing fight against al-Qa'ida and its sympathizers. There, alongside all its other contributions, the CIA is helping our government chart a new way forward on interrogation, one in keeping with the President's Executive Order of January 22nd. You, the men and women of this great institution, do the hard work and take the tough risks that intelligence and espionage demand.

I am very proud of what you do, here and abroad, to protect the United States. Your skill, courage, commitment, and focus on mission make the CIA indispensable to the nation. It is a privilege to serve with you.

The full thing is here.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 07:13 AM | Add Comment
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You silly, stupid people. What exactly gives you the right to think for yourself and ignore what “The Deciders” have decided?

For once, mainstream journalists did not retreat to the studied neutrality of quoting dueling antagonists.

They tried to perform last rites on the ludicrous claim about President Obama's death panels, telling Sarah Palin, in effect, you've got to quit making things up.

But it didn't matter. The story refused to die.

The crackling, often angry debate over health-care reform has severely tested the media's ability to untangle a story of immense complexity. In many ways, news organizations have risen to the occasion; in others they have become agents of distortion. But even when they report the facts, they have had trouble influencing public opinion.

Before blasting Kurtz, allow me to congratulate and thank him for admitting that the media has taken sides in Palin v. Obama and that they arenÂ’t even pretending to be neutral. At least he got the right.

That said, I’d love to see all the pieces from his beloved “mainstream journalists” debunking the many myths the Democrats threw out during the Bush years. How about relentless attempts at “influencing public opinion” when Obama distorted John McCain’s position on health care during the campaign (a position Obama is now open to adopting himself, sort of)? There aren’t any, because the media was an accomplice to those creations.

Funny how Kurtz is glad that “journalists” have finally gotten into the fight when it comes to saving the failing Obama health plan and presidency.

HereÂ’s a little free info for Mr. KurtzÂ…people simply donÂ’t trust you guys anymore. There are too many sources of information and the party line doesnÂ’t square with reality as many people know it.

No, the health care bills don’t refer to “death panels” but people know that when you talk about “bending the cost curve down” that means cutting services. Given Obama's creepy science adviser and his less than stellar record on life issues (he never met an abortion regulation he liked, he's supported what amounted to infanticide and he himself openly wondered whether hip replacement surgery for the elderly who were terminally ill was a good use of resources), a lot of people simply don't trust the guy on this issue.

Kurtz and his ilk may decide they will buy Obama’s promises of ‘savings’ through better record keeping and increased testing (which won’t actually save money according to the CBO. How about the media get on “influencing public opinion” about that lie?) but the public is not obligated to do so.

Why should anyone believe Obama’s projections given their miserable rate of failure to date? Just look at their claims of “unemployment topping out at 8%”, deficit projections which just jumped $2 trillion and their shock at ‘cash for clunkers’ running out of money in a week. That’s three areas the administration has bungled their projections and promises yet we should just swallow their projections on health care? Why? Sorry but, “because we are journalists” isn’t an acceptable answer.

Yes, some of the town hall protesters have used coarse language and their understanding of Section19432, subsection 342q4 of the bill may not land them an invite to some think tanks policy retreat weekend but they have the basic framework right and they donÂ’t like it.

Worse stillÂ…they arenÂ’t listening to you and your friends. How terribly sad for you all.

Posted by: DrewM at 06:37 AM | Add Comment
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